For Nirenberg, time has come today

1of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

2of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

3of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

4of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

5of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

6of 7Mayor Ron Nirenberg gives the state of the city address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

7of 7Ed Whitacre introduces Mayor Ron Nirenberg before the mayor gave the state of the city address address Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at the San Antonio Convention Center.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

He walked onstage to the strains of the Chambers Brothers’ 1967 psychedelic-rock classic, “Time Has Come Today.”

That tune is a favorite of Ron Nirenberg, who handpicked it for Tuesday’s United State of the City address, his first as San Antonio mayor. It’s an emphatic, if open-ended, call for action that ultimately concludes, “Can’t put it off another day.”

Standing in front of this city’s titans of business and politics, Nirenberg also made an emphatic, if open-ended, call for action. And he continually assured his Convention Center audience that this city can’t put it off another day.

In other words, urgency was the big theme of Nirenberg’s 30-minute speech, the chorus that he came home to after each verse about transportation or economic development.

“Now is the day and now is the hour.”

“The future will not wait.”

“A crisis is fast approaching.”

It’s easy to compare Nirenberg with Julián Castro, the mayor with whom he’ll end up bookending this decade in San Antonio. After all, they both came to office as young men brimming with big commitments and ambitious plans.

In his first State of the City address, in 2010, Castro promised to deliver 20,000 net jobs that year. On Tuesday, Nirenberg pledged “to help create more jobs than any mayoral administration in San Antonio history,” setting a goal of 70,000 over the next two years.

Of course, job creation is a natural preoccupation for any mayor, particularly one speaking at an event organized by the chambers of commerce. But Nirenberg and Castro approached it from different angles.

For Castro, education was the foundation.

“We have to make sure we build up terrific brainpower,” he said in 2010. In that speech, Castro previewed an early education program that would become his signature achievement, Pre-K 4 SA, and a college-admittance counseling center that would become Cafe College.

He emphasized social and cultural change, talking about art and the need for beautiful open spaces that would improve the aesthetics of San Antonio. He talked about the need to address teen pregnancy.

Castro wanted to pull the city toward a revitalized urban core, secure in the belief that it would make individual San Antonians healthier, more fulfilled and feeling a greater sense of community. With a city that appealing, he argued, the jobs would follow.

On Tuesday, he unveiled ConnectSA, a nonprofit devoted to crafting a multimodal transportation system that can go before voters in 2019. It will likely focus on rapid transit corridors to reduce commute times throughout the city, rather than the kind of downtown streetcar starter project championed by Castro.

He also called for $110 million in street maintenance funding in next year’s city budget.

Essentially, it’s what Nirenberg described last year, at a League of Women Voters forum, as an “all-of-the-above strategy” to transportation.

District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval will be one of ConnectSA’s directors.

“I think we’ve really been missing an advocate, a voice for equalizing transportation,” Sandoval said, after hearing Nirenberg’s speech. “For decades, we’ve invested in roadway projects and that’s not a full-blown infrastructure. You also need the public-transportation infrastructure. I think it’s about time we had a group advocate for that.”

Manny Pelaez, who succeeded Nirenberg last year as the councilman for District 8, said: “He’s a big-idea mayor. Today he articulated important goals for the city we want to be. What struck a chord with me is his reminding us that being the 7th largest city isn’t the same as being a top-10 economy.”

Like the Chambers Brothers, however, Nirenberg, left us Tuesday to speculate about the specifics behind all that urgency.

His new Blue Chip Jobs Council will bring together some of the city’s best business minds — including Graham Weston, Johnny Hernandez and Elaine Mendoza — to brainstorm on methods to stimulate investment, but what that group will produce is a big question mark.

Nirenberg’s goal of alleviating San Antonio’s affordable-housing crunch is admirable, but we don’t yet know how it’ll be executed. And we all know that a state-of-the-art multimodal transportation system, while much needed, won’t come cheap.

Those uncertainties, at least for the moment, faded away as Nirenberg left the stage to the opening riff of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”

Gilbert Garcia is a native of Brownsville, Texas, with more than 20 years experience writing for weekly and daily newspapers. A graduate of Harvard University, he has won awards for his reporting on music, sports, religion, and politics. He is the author of the 2012 book, "Reagan's Comeback: Four Weeks in Texas That Changed American Politics Forever," published by Trinity University Press. One of his feature stories also appeared in the national anthology, "Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001."